Aldis Systems
A Customized Approach to Digital Asset Management

Today, the scale at which the business world is producing digital media results in a content overwhelm. That’s why every organization is striving to implement comprehensive digital asset management (DAM) solutions to effectively store, organize, manage, and retrieve all their digital assets. However, DAM systems are often complex. As a result, organizations require to invest significant effort and time to deploy these solutions and customize them according to their unique business needs and objectives.

This is where Aldis Systems steps in. Founded in 2009, Aldis Systems is a DAM solutions provider. Its team of librarians and media experts helps businesses organize digital assets, streamline workflow, and design as well as optimize DAM platforms as per their requirements.

In an interaction with CIO Applications magazine, Clayton Condit, Partner, Aldis Systems, along with Phil Seibel, Digital Media Manager at Aldis Systems, sheds light on the importance of organizing digital files within a systemic DAM infrastructure and how their company is helping people to get the most out of their media assets.

Can you please highlight the challenges that you have observed in the current market?

Phil: People oftentimes face difficulty while selecting or getting started with a DAM process. Due to the lack of expertise and poor understanding of the technology, businesses struggle to choose the right-fit DAM solutions for themselves. Even though they get inputs and recommendations from their in-house marketing, administrative, creative, or production departments, they lack the skilled human resources and time required to engage full-time in operating a brand-new system.

We always focus on customizing DAM technology according to clients’ unique business requirements. That’s why our trained team first gains a comprehensive understanding of businesses’ existing processes and their information-seeking behavior. We also make sure that clients’ departmental feedbacks are incorporated into the DAM technology to make it competitive, time-saving, and cost-effective.

What makes Aldis Systems different from its competitors?

Phil: What differentiates us is that our solution is software and hardware agnostic. Our team comprises experts in library and information science who understand how production and media workflow function. We follow a librarian’s approach in understanding what our clients are trying to accomplish, what information they need, why they need that information, and what terminologies they are using to search for it.

Clayton: We build custom and hosted systems and hardware servers or work with our clients’ existing solutions according to their requirements. Our staff proficiently develop hardware and cloud solutions and conduct technological implementations for our customers. We also nurture deep relationships with our vendors, which helps us build software APIs and provide businesses with a custom and interactive web interface.

Can you talk about how your solutions benefit your clients by substantiating them with a couple of case studies?

Clayton: A healthcare company was not having desired user engagement owing to their outdated systems.They needed someone who could take a long look at the assets that were working or not working, understand what their photographers, videographers, editors, and other stakeholders wanted, and revamp the system accordingly.So, we came in and spoke to everybody involved in the processes. The next step was to conduct a thorough assessment and media audit from department to department, which revealed the lack of effective communication among each other. To this end, we ensured that every voice was heard and built workflows based on all stakeholders’ recommendations—from the creative side to IT to high-end administrators. Communication is the key in our approach, where we make sure that everybody in the room understands their stake and contributes accordingly in the process.

We are also working with Best Buy, a renowned consumer electronics company, for several years. The company has tons of custom solutions that integrate into different stores. We manage all their media assets in these stores. It includes managing what people would see on the screens, ensuring legal compliance, playing content for a specific duration, and so on. Our long-term collaboration has made us kind of an extension to their teams.

How did the pandemic affect your clients and how did Aldis Systems play a vital role in mitigating those challenges?

Phil: Many media production companies collaborate with freelancers to distribute the workload and have on-demand staff whenever they need it. But during the COVID-19 situation, hiring freelancers or cost-effectively retaining in-house employees has become quite tricky. It is because the idea of having a centralized office where all media remain stored and people work on a central server has turned into a luxury now. What made us successful in enabling our clients to adapt to the new normal was our capability to provide remote workflows and capacities through cloud-based asset structures.

Too much creative work with the freelancers and agencies are causing companies to lose their intellectual property and raw media. Aldis Systems enables clients companies to quickly and easily share assets with people working remotely. We’re providing them with ongoing librarian support, so their creative teams can focus on what they do best. Our approach allows the technology to create a huge efficiency by easy use and reuse of media assets, helping the clients to save time and money.

Also, when our clients couldn’t produce new content during the pandemic, they were able to lean into their existing media libraries and found what they already had in their organized DAM system. They were able to continue to make new content from existing assets. In fact, some have mandated asset reuse as a cost saving measure when they saw what their teams could do with existing assets.

What is up for Aldis Systems in the upcoming 12 to 18 months?

Clayton: Aldis Systems has shifted from on-premises performance-based hardware, including offsite cloning and archived backups, to full cloud-based integrations. This has enabled us to provide scalable and cost-effective infrastructures to our clients.

Phil: Currently, we’re in a great position to explore, investigate, and research the solutions and translate the technical language into something that works for the end-users. We’re making sure to provide an affordable, accessible, high-availability DAM infrastructure to our clients. By bringing all the potential ideas for security compliance and elasticity to the table, our company intends to help clients on every possible front. The capacity to quickly research, analyze, and adapt to emerging technologies in the market is undoubtedly our greatest strength.

We’ve also realized the immense value of the skillsets of librarians and information scientists in this field. Our goal is to ensure that human intelligence and technology work collaboratively to optimize the process of ingesting, storing, finding, and archiving assets to make our business model valuable.